Breaking Free

Why stepping out is the only way to travel.

I have seen some remarkable things while out running. I have watched sea lions mating, wrestling, or arguing, or—humanlike—all three at once, at the end of an abandoned pier under the Golden Gate Bridge, and I have surprised cows on a country road in New Hampshire, and Matthew McConaughey on the path around Town Lake in Austin, Texas (both the cow and McConaughey were shirtless). I have run up the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art just like Rocky (and every other middle-aged mook in the world), and I have come upon, by happenstance, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall, at which point I slowed to a walk and descended into it, hoping my bare legs and sweaty shirt would imply no disrespect, and then ran off again, feeling newly and powerfully blessed I was able to do so.

If I'm in a city, I head straight downtown, or if in a state capital, I orient on the building with the golden dome. If in a university town, I head toward campus, and when I get to the campus, I look for the football stadium, and try the doors. Sometimes I get lucky. (Note to football historians: A game-clinching 100-yard touchdown was scored against Yale, by myself, versus fierce if imaginary opposition, at 7 a.m. on September 7, 2006.)

I am drawn to historical markers like a moth to a flame, sweating onto plinths while I read about battles and long-gone settlements, and I have come across hulking remnants of the industrial past, like the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, and felt an odd reverence. I have also conducted expeditions into my own history, running by my college dorm and the summer rental where my earliest memories were staged, and once I undertook a six-mile mission to my father's childhood home, in Dallas, only to find it had been replaced years earlier by a Greco-columned mini-mansion. So I stood in front of the site, put my hand on a tree old enough for him to have known it, and then, like he once did, I headed off to the northeast at a deliberate pace.

I have also ended up in ugly industrial strips, like the one north of Charlotte, North Carolina, and stumbled through a wasteland of shiny empty office towers next to lonely 1950s-era houses in Cobb County, Georgia, which must have been zoned by libertarians on acid. I have had to end my runs and come back before I made it anywhere interesting, and I have kept going to get that fantastic view, only to come back so late I arrived at a cocktail party still sweating into my dress shirt, telling everyone about my serendipity.

I tell you all this to explain why I am not (yet) crazy from all the traveling I do. I average 25 trips a year, and more and more I feel like a hamster in a Habitrail. I scurry into an entry tube, also known as an airport, and then proceed through other tubes, a.k.a. buses and taxies, and P.F. Chang's and smart new brewpubs in renovated downtowns, before arriving, in every instance, at the exact same rest cube furnished with the same paper-wrapped soaps, thence to sleep before reentering the tubes and speeding off to my next, predictable nodule. Like a hamster, I enjoy only the illusion of freedom, but unlike a hamster, I can put on running shorts and break through the tube walls.

It's not always easy, though. Outside of certain older downtowns—New York, Chicago, San Francisco—pedestrianism itself is kind of a throwback, the sort of thing done by people who also re-enact Civil War battles and play "base-ball" under 1850s rules. If God had wanted us to use our legs, say 21st-century planners, he wouldn't have given us four-lane highways and drive-thru windows. So on those mornings when I step out of the hotel entrance, and run up the inbound driveway, I feel like a felon: a hamster gone rogue.

A few times earlier this year, I used the Internet to plan my runs before heading to the airport, checking on favorite routes that others have logged, and even connecting with local runners willing to guide me personally. And that has its significant pleasures, because nobody knows the terrain like the people who've worn their grooves into it, but I also experience the loss of the possibility of getting lost. There's nothing quite like the chill of realizing I'm somewhere I haven't anticipated, with only a vague sense of how to get back, a slight but thrilling sense of unease now as rare as an urban corner without a Starbucks.

Better, I now think, to just go. That is, after all, the great advantage of our sport over all others—we don't need a ball or a team or a field or even, according to some, shoes. We just need to stand someplace, imagine ourselves in the center of a circle, pick one out of the 360 degrees available to us, and head thataway. What the Habitrail designers want, ultimately, is control: They want you to go down this street into that mall past that sign. And, stuck in cars or trains or even on downtown sidewalks, people have no choice but to obey. Once, at a Disney World hotel, I asked a hotel clerk where I could run, and she said to take one of their shuttles to a nearby resort with attractive running paths. I nodded and smiled and turned away to head outside and run on the access roads, dodging buses, breaking through tubes, a member of the Rebel Alliance.

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